B1043 <=> B1045 (BTG XLII Beelzebub in America, p. 1044)

“This accidental constatation of mine at once very much astonished me, chiefly because I was already informed from every aspect and wholly convinced that in the present period everywhere on this planet the beings of almost all the other groupings, those recently formed as well as those which are at a very advanced stage of their community, imitate to the full all the innovations of the beings of this still quite recently formed grouping and enthusiastically adopt these innovations in the process of their ordinary existence, and at the same time, all the external manifestations of the beings of this new grouping and consequently the ‘inner subjective significance’ which engenders these external manifestations, consist only of that which, as I have already said, has become to the great grief of the free beings of these other independent groupings fixed and inherent in the common presences of the ordinary beings of these groupings.

“In consequence of this unexpected constatation of mine, there then arose in me a highly intensive impulse of curiosity to make clear to myself the logical causes which had engendered this terrestrial incongruity.

“All that day, while sitting in this Childs awaiting the arrival of the beings from the continent of Europe who had accompanied me, and while riding in the ‘motor taxi’ and also while on the boat itself, I continued to ponder very actively the solution of this question, of course appearing to strangers as an automatic observer of everything proceeding around me; and in the ability outwardly to appear such, in order to resemble them in this respect, and thus not to be, so to say, conspicuous, or as they say there ‘not to strike the eye,’ I became there on the Earth ideally or as they would say ‘artistically’ expert.